I Left the Pack Carrying His Twins · Rhea Wolfe

Chapter 1: The Paper They Made Me Sign

The council chamber at Cross Creek smells like cedar polish and old money, and I threw up in the parking lot before I went in.

Morning sickness. Nine weeks. I had known for six hours.

"Sella Marsh." The Clerk didn't look up from his tablet. "You understand the purpose of this hearing?"

"Yes."

"State it."

"Formal dissolution of a fated bond." My voice came out steady, which surprised both of us. "By rejection."

Eleven people at that table. Roan's mother at the far end in a grey suit, hands folded like a woman at church. Roan's uncle Marcus in the middle chair, running it, the way he ran everything.

And Roan, standing by the window with his back to the room, because he had not been able to look at me since I came through the door.

Six weeks earlier, on the night of the Blood Moon, that man had held my face in both hands and said mine against my mouth like it was the only word he had left.

"Alpha Vale." Marcus's voice was gentle. That's what people never understand about how these things actually go — nobody shouts. "In your own words, for the record."

Roan turned around.

He looked like he hadn't slept in a month. He had a bruise along his jaw that somebody had put there in a training ring and I had wanted, stupidly, since the second I walked in, to touch it.

"The bond between myself and Sella Marsh," he said, "is not compatible with the security of this pack."

"Because?"

"Because she's omega-ranked, unaffiliated, and the Ironbrook treaty requires a Luna the northern packs will accept." He said it like reading a shipping manifest. "I reject her as my mate."

I want to tell you it hurt. That's not the right word.

It was like being unplugged. Every warm thing in my chest just — stopped, and the cold came in behind it, and my wolf, who had been singing since the Blood Moon, went silent so completely that for a second I thought she had died.

I stayed on my feet. I'm still proud of that.

"Do you accept the rejection?" Marcus asked me.

If I said no, the bond stays open. Half-alive, half-torn, for years sometimes. There are omegas who never accept and spend thirty years feeling a man breathe on the other side of a wall.

I put my hand flat on my stomach, under the table, where nobody could see.

"I accept," I said.

* * *

There was a paper. Of course there was a paper.

Voluntary Severance and Release. Three pages. Clause 4 was the one that mattered: in consideration of the sum of forty thousand dollars, the undersigned releases all claim to pack residence, pack medical, pack succession, and any claim arising from the bond, present or future.

Present or future. Marcus Vale did not become what he is by leaving gaps.

"There's a car outside," he said, capping his pen. "It'll take you as far as Bellhaven. Anywhere further, you're on your own."

"Uncle." Roan's voice, sharp for the first time. "That's not—"

"That's exactly what it is." Marcus didn't raise his eyes. "You had six weeks to handle this privately and you spent them moping in the north field. Sign the paper, Miss Marsh."

I signed it.

And nine weeks of a secret sat there in the room with us, and not one of those eleven people asked the one question that would have changed everything, because an omega who has been rejected is not a person you ask questions.

Roan caught up with me in the corridor.

He got as far as saying my name.

"Don't," I said.

"Sella—"

"You just told a room I wasn't compatible with the security of the pack." I made myself look at him. That was harder than the chamber. "So which is it? Did you mean it, or were you too much of a coward to say no to your uncle in front of witnesses? Because those are both terrible answers, Roan, and I don't want either of them in my head for the next fifty years."

His jaw worked.

"There are things about the treaty you don't—"

"Then tell me."

He didn't.

That's what I took with me. Not the rejection — the silence in the four seconds after I said then tell me, when he could have said anything at all, and chose the pack.

I got in the car.

* * *

I didn't go to Bellhaven.

I got out at the second gas station, walked twenty minutes to the bus depot, and bought a ticket for the furthest city the forty thousand would keep me alive in. Two days later I was in a walk-up apartment above a laundromat, three hundred miles from any wolf who had ever heard the name Vale.

The healer at the county clinic — human, kind, entirely unaware of what she was looking at — turned the monitor toward me at eleven weeks.

"There's two," she said. "See? Two sacs. Congratulations, honey."

Two.

I sat up on that table with the gel still cold on my stomach and started laughing, and then I couldn't stop, and then it turned into something else and the poor woman had to get me a box of tissues and a cup of water.

Twins.

I knew what that meant even if she didn't. Wolf twins are rare and they run in exactly one kind of line — an alpha line, doubled, a bloodline strong enough to split. In Cross Creek there'd have been a ceremony. There'd have been Marcus Vale calculating succession before I was out of the second trimester.

My hand went flat on my stomach again, in a different way this time.

"Okay," I told them. "Okay. Nobody's ever going to know whose you are."

* * *

Their names are Nia and Kade. They turned five in March.

Nia reads three grades ahead and can smell a lie through a closed door. Kade is quiet, watchful, sleeps in the doorway of his sister's room like a guard dog, and has never once been sick a day in his life.

I work nights in the ER at St. Brigid's. I have a badge, a lease, a car with 180,000 miles on it, and a school five blocks away that lets me pick them up at 3:15 on Tuesdays.

For five years, that was the whole world, and it was enough.

Then, on the second Tuesday in October, my phone rang at 2:41 in the afternoon while I was restocking a crash cart.

"Ms. Marsh? It's Nurse Alvarez at Hollis Elementary. I need you to come now. There's been an incident with Kade in the yard."

"Is he hurt?"

A pause. One second too long.

"He's not hurt," she said carefully. "Ms. Marsh — I don't know how to say this. Three of the boys are saying he changed."

I was already running for the parking lot.

"Kids say things," I said. "Kids make things up. Is he—"

"There was an adult in the yard," Nurse Alvarez said. "A man. He'd come in about the transfer paperwork for a student, he was standing right there when it happened." Papers rustled on her end. "He hasn't left. He's asking for the boy's mother by name. He says he'll wait as long as it takes."

I stopped in the middle of the ambulance bay with my keys in my hand.

"What name?" I said. "What name did he ask for?"

"Sella Marsh," she said. "But that's the strange thing — he didn't ask for a Marsh. When I said we had no student under that name, he corrected himself." Her voice went puzzled and very kind. "He asked for Kade Vale."